La Jolla Art Center school was ahead of its time

Oceanside Museum highlights an important yet forgotten moment in San Diego's cultural history

At the Oceanside Museum of Art Dave Hampton, middle, the curator of the museum’s current exhibit, Contemporary Art Wins a Beachhead: The La Jolla School of Arts Faculty 1960-1964, speaks with Fred Holle, left, an artist whose work is on display in the exhibit, and James Aitchison, at right, a student of Holle’s.

At the Oceanside Museum of Art Dave Hampton, middle, the curator of the museum’s current exhibit, Contemporary Art Wins a Beachhead: The La Jolla School of Arts Faculty 1960-1964, speaks with Fred Holle, left, an artist whose work is on display in the exhibit, and James Aitchison, at right, a student of Holle’s.

Artists complaining about being disrespected and disregarded; people complaining about artists making art nobody likes; institutions complaining about a lack of financial support.

That’s not from last week. That’s from the early ’60s, a neglected moment in San Diego’s cultural history when, just before the founding of UC San Diego’s art department, a newly expanded Art Center in La Jolla — now the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego — had a serious, college-level visual arts school.

“I grew up here and it was all news to me,” said David Hampton, curator for “Contemporary Art Wins a Beachhead: The La Jolla School of Arts 1960-1964” at the Oceanside Museum of Art through July 8. “It wasn’t something people talked about when they talked about art in San Diego. And aside from the people who lived through it, it has been forgotten for all practical purposes.”

While it would be too much to call it a golden age for the arts in La Jolla, it presaged by more than a decade the Art Center’s turn toward contemporary art, and it brought a bracing mix of artists and art students into the unabashedly conservative community.

“During a one-year period (1963), walking home from school, I was stopped 37 times,” said San Diego artist James Aitchison, then a student at the school. “La Jolla was a very small town, and if you looked like an art student, you were suspect.”

But it was not just law enforcement that was skeptical of Aitchison and his ilk. Many of the practicing artists in La Jolla, as well as their patrons, tended toward landscape or portrait painting. They had little use for the edgier tendencies of the Art Center’s faculty or their beatnik-like appearance.

“Most of them (the artists working in the community) were more conservative, by and large,” said former Art Center faculty member Fred Holle, who is now based near San Francisco. “Many of them were very competent painters, but there wasn’t much in the way of experimentation or risk. It was basically redoing what had already been pretty well resolved.

“That’s why with the advent of the Art Center school, we generated to some degree considerable interest in more experimental approaches to painting and drawing and things of that nature.”

Holle had attended two years of art school and served four years in the Navy when he arrived in La Jolla in 1958 and started teaching drawing classes at the Art Center. He came of age as an artist as he and his colleagues grappled with what Holle (using a phrase from critic Gerald Nordland) called the current “contemporary cliché” — Abstract Expressionism.

“When you use the word cliché, it sounds false, but it was a very profound and genuine thing,” Holle said. “I personally grew up as a figurative artist. I went to schools that taught me traditional forms and grounded me in that way. So it was a revelation for me to be involved in (Abstract Expressionism). I learned so much from it.